Below is the homily I preached at the funeral of the widow of the priest that sponsored me for ordination.

Burial Homily for Gay Hadden Watson

St. John’s Episcopal Church, Bangor, Maine, July 25, 2015

By The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

Jesus says a remarkable thing to his disciples. (John 14:12). He says to them, greater things than I have done you shall do. He has healed the sick. He has fed the multitudes in the desert. He has driven out the evil spirit and set the captives free. He has raised the dead.

Yet he says to his disciples – greater things than I have done you shall do. And this prophecy has come true. Think of the millions that have been helped through the ministry of Christian hospitals. People forget that hospitals are a Christian invention. Millions also have been helped and healed by the ministry of Christian prayer often working hand in glove with the practitioners of the healing arts. Think of the millions of poor that have been fed and people of all sorts who have been liberated from addictions and depression and other oppressions of the spirit. Think of the worldwide effort to eliminate slavery – heroically led by Christian disciples such as William Wilberforce and John Newton – the author of the hymn Amazing Grace. Literally millions upon millions of captives have been set free.

The lame walk and the blind see not only literally but figuratively. People who have been limping through life – they find Christ or better Christ finds them – the church enfolds them – embraces them – they become part of the community of the Holy Spirit – of Christ’s body the church where the lifeblood of his sacrificial love comes through the whole body –and people who have been limping through life begin to walk and run. The prophet Isaiah says that they who wait upon the Lord will rise up as on eagle wings. They shall walk and not tire. They shall run and not faint. People who have been blind to the reality of God – to the significance of eternal and holy things – now see a whole dimension to life they could not see before. Their eyes are opened to see who God is, who Jesus is and to recognize the Lord in the stranger at the door.

And the dead are raised by the millions, as people who are dead in their sins without the knowledge of God and without hope for this life or the life of the world to come discover new real and abundant life – a new life with God and with their neighbors that begins now and which the grave cannot hold.

We are here today to give thanks for the life of Gay Watson and to renew our hope in Jesus Christ the Lord and our faith in the resurrection of the dead in the life of the world to come.

One of the things that we can give thanks for is that Gay completely identified herself with this great work of Christ that he does through his disciples.

Given her family background and the schooling and the social circles with which she was well acquainted, Gay could have married someone with tremendous prospects by the world’s standards. She fell in love with and married a seminarian soon to be a mission priest and spent the best part of her life supporting his ministry and making a home for her husband and sons – a home with enough love and welcome to extend to include the people in the parishes they served. Many, many people were blessed by that warmth and welcome and genuine Christian hospitality and I am one. I shall always be grateful for it and for the many kindnesses that Father Watson and Gay showed to me.

I run into a lot of people who been very successful and around midlife they are looking for a change. They are looking now for significance rather than success. I think Gay chose significance right from the start. She knew she was choosing a sacrificial life. She had clergy in her family. One of her relatives was a Bishop. She knew it would be a life of real sacrifice. There was of course financial sacrifice. Clergy salaries are a bit better now – though still modest by worldly standards.

I remember being in Aroostook County with Father Watson and going to hear a talk on eligibility for food stamps with a view to helping our parishioners and realizing that we were probably qualified.

There are other sacrifices the rectory family makes. If you live in a rectory you have 100 landlords – some of whom think it is their personal mission to keep an eye on the rectory family. You live in a fishbowl. While the parish can be a wonderful support and web of Christian friends for the rectory family – nevertheless, original sin strikes everywhere – and the rectory family can be the victim of great unkindness and of an unfair judgmentalism. It is part of the cost of the ministry. Nobody I think would volunteer for this scrutiny. Some flee from it – unwilling to stick it out and take the good with the bad and soldier on and do their duty. Gay stayed the course.

Some of the sacrifices that the clergy make are quite visible. Some are invisible. The same is true – especially true for rectory families. There are many invisible sacrifices the rectory family makes that make the ministry go and today is a good day to feel the weight of those sacrifices and to give thanks for them – to ask the good Lord for forgiveness and healing for what has been endured that should not have had to be endured and to look at the fruit of that sacrifice.

To be part of what Christ is doing – the greater things that he is doing through his disciples – is to make an investment of Christian love in others not knowing the fruit – not knowing the ultimate significance.

Monica was a widow, and strong Christian. Her son was not. He was a brilliant academic with a playboy lifestyle. She prayed for him every day. She showered him with motherly affection. She prayed for decades. He became St. Augustine, perhaps the greatest Christian thinker of all times.

To be a Christian and to practice the Christian faith and live the Christian faith is to be involved in a ripple effect and you don’t know where the ripples will end. We do know this – St. Paul in the course of talking about the resurrection says – that nothing done in the name of Christ is ever done in vain. We will not know until we get to heaven the full effect of our efforts that look so small and seem so defeated in this life. Our sacrifices are not in vain. God uses them in his plan to accomplish more than we can ask or imagine.

I don’t like it when preachers talk about themselves but I am going to talk about myself for a moment as a way of talking about the impact of the witness of Gay and Father Watson.

It was through Gay that my wife and I were introduced to Father Watson. I had a lot of trouble getting ordained. I was stopped one time. Another time a rector forgot to turn in my paperwork. I had a seminary degree but no strong advocate for my ordination. During the summer after I graduated from seminary my wife and I were shearing sheep in Nova Scotia. We sheared sheep for a woman named Ann Priest. She was a well-known New York actress who owned Blue Island in Nova Scotia. We went out to Blue Island and sheared her wild island sheep. With the door to ordination closed, my wife and I had decided to go back to farming and had bought a farm in Presque Isle, Maine. When Ann Priest asked us what we were going to do after the summer shearing, we said we were going to Presque Isle. Oh, she said. The wife of the rector there was my roommate in prep school. I will give you an introduction.

Ann and Gay talked. Gay and Father talked and before I ever arrived in Presque Isle Father Watson had talked the Bishop of Maine into not closing St. Anne’s mission in Mars Hill because he had the vision to place me there. So let me give you a progress report on one life that was touched by the warmth of the rectory in Presque Isle.

I am now 34 years ordained. I have served 8 churches including a cathedral. I have preached well over 1000 sermons – celebrated the Eucharist more times than that – presided over countless baptisms marriages and funerals. I have obtained a PhD in pastoral theology from Boston College. I have authored four books. I have been a seminary professor with direct teaching of over 500 students. Several of my students are now bishops in Africa. One of my students has started a seminary in Brazil and another teaches at a seminary in Africa. One of my students is leading the renewal and turnaround of a major historic New York City parish. Many of the students that I taught are serving the kinds of places the Watsons served their whole life, places clergy are not standing in line to serve. Who can know where it will end? None of it would’ve happened without Father Watson. Father Watson would not have happened without Gay Watson. And this is just one life they touched. There are many more. Gay’s life was in many ways humble and quiet but it was a life of great significance.

We give thanks to God for all of it.

We did not pretend that Gay was a perfect person. One of the great consolations of the faith is that our hope ultimately does not rest on our accomplishments or our virtues.

Our hope is in the mercy and love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ the Lord. We cling to that and rest our hope in Him and we commend our sister to that never failing love and mercy, knowing that he will bring to perfection the good work begun in her. Amen

Holy Order

A Sermon Preached at the Ordination of Aidan Everett Smith to the Sacred Order of Deacons in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Catskill, NY by the Rector, The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding, March 28, 2015

We have come here today to witness and participate in the celebration of the sacrament of holy orders.

So what is the sacrament? Sacrament is the Latin word; mysterion, the Greek word. The sacrament is a sign, a holy mystery. It is a sign that really and truly participates in the reality to which it points. And the reality to which it points is Christ. In a sacrament there is a real and true presence of Christ, a sacramental presence. Christ is really and truly present in the mystery of the water baptism, in the bread and the wine, when the man and the woman make promises to each other and to God in the face of the congregation, when a penitent makes a confession and the priest utters the words of Christ’s forgiveness, and there is a real and sacramental presence of Christ in this mystery of holy order.

God is bigger than the sacrament, infinitely more, utterly above and beyond. But in and with and through the sacrament Christ is, as Martin Luther says, havable. In the sacrament we can lay hold of Him. He is present and active to accomplish His purposes – to complete the work the Father has given Him to do, to bring many sons and daughters to glory and perfect all things in Himself and offer them to the Father in the power of the Spirit in a cosmic act of Eucharist.

Christ will be present here today in a unique way through this sacrament of holy order. There are three forms of this sacrament of ordering, of ordination: bishop, priest, and deacon. Today the church is gathered here to receive from Christ Himself, present through the Holy Spirit, working in and through the prayers of the whole church, laying His hands on the ordinand through the hands of the Bishop—a new deacon. There is a unique presence of Christ to the person being ordained. Christ is present granting the grace, power and authority for the ordinand to accomplish the work to which they are being called. Christ is also present in and through the ordinand gifting the church with the gift of holy order. The holy order of the church is today being strengthened and amplified so that the work of Christ may go forward both in the church and in the world. In this ordination it is also clear that a share of the order in the church is being placed in the hands of a new generation.

So what is the gift of Holy Order? In what way is it a participation in Christ and an effectual sign of His presence in and through His Church? All the sacraments are about salvation, about God fixing us, healing us, blessing us, making us whole and holy and not only us but also about God healing and making new the whole creation, the whole cosmos. Doesn’t St. Paul say, in Chapter 8 of Romans that the whole creation is groaning in travail like a woman in childbirth waiting for the appearing of sons of God? God’s purpose in Jesus Christ the Lord is to remake the human race as the first stage of remaking and renewing the whole creation.

In the beginning the Father brought out of nothingness the good creation. He spoke it into existence through a Word of eternal Love–the Word who is the eternal Son of God and who became incarnate in Jesus Christ the Lord. It is the will of God that the whole cosmos should be a harmony of love—such that the whole creation is a song of praise and adoration to the Father, each and every creature rightly related to each and every other creature, all bound together by the Holy Spirit of Love through whom the Father and the Son delight themselves in each other.

At the pinnacle of this creation, at the top of this creation of love God creates the man and the woman. They are to know God’s love and to return it freely and to delight in and care for the good creation and lead creation’s praises to the Father through the Son and in the power of the Spirit.

Out of the chaos of nothingness God has created a cosmos. The cosmos is the ordered creation that has been spoken into existence through the eternal Word of God’s love. The cosmos is a hierarchy, a holy order of love. The creation, the cosmos is itself a sacrament of the Creator. The creation does not contain God. We are not pantheists but the creation does participate in the divine order of God’s love, in God’s holy order, in God’s hierarchy.

Since God’s holy order is a holy order of love, there must be freedom. Where there is freedom there is the possibility of rebellion. The Bible points in a mysterious way to a rebellion that precedes the rebellion of Adam and Eve. A rebellion against God’s loving order has already taken place. The poet Milton imagines that Satan says, “better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven,” and so the hierarchy of God’s love is rejected. The man and the woman reject God’s order and they become profoundly disordered. They have a disordered relationship with God and with each other and with the rest of the creation. The question of salvation is a question of hierarchy, of holy order and how holy order is to be restored.

Hierarchy has become a suspect word in our time. But it is a perfectly good church word. It means literally holy order, hieros arche, holy order. The sacrament we come to celebrate today is the sacrament of hierarchy, of holy order and one of the things that is happening is that someone is being made a member of the hierarchy of the church. The hierarchy of the church exists by God’s providence so that there may be in the church and through the church in the world, a sacramental presence, a real presence of the havable Christ reordering us, recreating us, delivering us from chaos into cosmos and from disorder into holy order.

Here is what is happening in this ordination. The crucified and risen Lord comes to the apostles in the upper room where they are hiding after the crucifixion, appears and shows them his hands and his side. He breathes on them and into them and says, “my Peace – my shalom – I give you.” And what is the shalom of the Lord but the holy order of the Father’s love perfected in the future which the Son has just won for them at the price of the cross– that future as the prophet Isaiah says where there shall be no more disease, no more hurting or killing, where the lion and Lamb will lie down together – where death itself is vanquished, where the knowledge of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea and where God is all in all. This shalom – this Holy, right ordering Spirit, he breathes into them and then says to them, “as the Father has sent me even so send I you.”

In the sacrament of order the Lord gives the gift of his spirit which makes apostles. He puts forth his crucified and glorified hands in, with and through the hands of the Bishop and gives to the ordinand a share in the apostolic vocation which is to create a people in, with and through whom God will establish his holy order of love. A people completely surrendered and subject to Jesus Christ, living under his hierarchy. A people living under the rule of love and by the law of love and oriented, ordered, taking their bearing, fixing their aim toward the perfection of all things in the love of God himself– Jesus Christ the Lord.

The crucified and risen Lord searches out these frightened and discouraged men utterly sunk in darkness and chaos, and by the gift of his spirit – which is the spirit of the resurrection and which comes at the price of the cross – he re-creates them. He brings them out of chaos and places them in holy order that they might by their life of witness and worship be a sacrament of the new life, the new creation, the new cosmos which he brings up out of the grave– the kingdom which will come on earth as it is in heaven – the kingdom – the holy order of law.

The gathered apostles are a sacrament of the cosmos renewed and re-created in love by the sacrifice the Savior. This community which is born in the encounter with the crucified and risen Lord is a sacrament of Christ himself, victorious over the chaos of sin and evil and death, breathing into the world new life – the holy order of shalom. The church cannot contain Christ. He is too big. But he is really and truly present in the church. He is havable here. He is havable in and through the words of the scripture, and in and through the bread and wine, and in and through the fellowship and service in his name, and he is havable in and through those who are the successors of the apostles who by the power of the Holy Spirit have received the gift of holy order and therefore the vocation to be a sacrament within the church of the crucified and risen Lord breathing his shalom into men and women – restoring them to the holy order for which they were made – so that the church can fulfill itself as the body of Christ – his sacrament in the world of the first fruits of the kingdom of love – the life of the new cosmos – the new creation.

Bishops have the fullness of this gift. Priests and deacons have a share in the bishop’s ministry. They assist him in different ways. The priest is sacramental sign of Christ the priest, the pastor and the teacher. The deacon is an icon and sacramental sign of Christ the servant, who came not to be served but to serve.

The church is a great democracy. It is a great democracy of sinners and a great democracy of the redeemed. The ground at the foot of the cross is flat and before the holiness of the sacrificial love of the Savior, we are all alike lost, all alike saved. In this sense the church is the most egalitarian organization that can be imagined.

But the church is also thoroughly hierarchical. It is an upside down hierarchy where he who would be first of all must be least of all. It is a very strict hierarchy. It is a hierarchy of love and sacrifice.

The Bishop and those who share in his ministry, the priests and the deacons, have by the gift of holy order, authority. They are to be a sacrament of Christ’s rule in his church, of Christ’s very own power and authority. And what might be the character of that authority? It is the character of sacrificial love which bears in itself the gift of new life – a life rightly ordered to God and to our brothers and sisters and to the new order of God’s new creation which is both come and coming.

The clergy must nourish this gift of order by returning again and again to the witness of the Apostles and to the apostolic encounter with the crucified and risen Lord where we know ourselves as sinners redeemed at great cost and as people delivered out of the chaos of a disordered life and into the holy order of God’s love. The clergy must give no other witness than the witness of the Apostles and convey intact their teaching and practice that the prayer which the saviour says over them might come true, “Even as the Father sends me, send I you.”

The clergy will fail, poor and frail human beings are bound to fail. Yet even when they do, in, with and through the sacrament of holy order there is a real presence of Christ in his church showing his people his hands and his side breathing into them new life. After all, the promises of God are irrevocable. Such promises are given in the sacrament of order.

Now Aidan in a few moments this congregation will join the prayers of Angels and archangels bidding the Holy Spirit to come upon you by the laying on of the Bishop’s hands – to the end that you might have the gift, calling and authority to be one of those through whom the crucified and risen Lord is really and truly present to his people – showing them the wounds of his love now glorified by the power of the spirit that he’s breathing into them – the spirit of God’s shalom. You are to be part of the holy order of the church so that the church – the whole people of God – can be the sacrament of Christ’s holy order in the world – so that many people shall be brought out of chaos and death to cosmos and the eternal life of God’s love.

Your seminary degree is well-earned. You have studied diligently. The sacrament of holy order which you are about to receive is unearned and undeserved and is yours by the providence of God and by his absolutely gratuitous mercy. It is a particular form and an intensification of the crucified and risen Lord reaching out to you – showing you the wounds of his love and breathing new life into you, bringing you out of chaos into cosmos and giving you a part, a share in His world changing work. He first did this in your baptism – He renews it in every Eucharist. Here He is touching you in, with, and through the hands of the Bishop, breathing into you His holy order, His shalom – so that your servanthood will take this special form and bear much fruit – so that Jesus Christ may be havable in the world in with and through his people. Christ is here today. The Spirit is here today. Breathe deeply. Amen

“And the Fragrance Filled the Whole House”

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen the Martyr in Stuebenville, Ohio, Five Lent, March 17, 2013

By the Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

 

When we gather for the liturgy of the church, when we celebrate the Eucharist, we are remembering what God has done in the past. We are remembering the past in a particular sort of way. By the power of the Holy Spirit as we are obedient to the command that He gave us on the night in which He was betrayed, “do this in remembrance of me.” What God has done in the past, the Father’s costly deed of saving love in sending the Son to save us by the Power the Holy Spirit has been made into a present and living reality – transforming our present existence and opening up a new future – whose horizon is heaven and the coming Kingdom of God. Just as the past is made present, the future is made present and we are given a foretaste of the world to come.

 

The future that God has in store for us will, until we die or the Lord returns, be already and not yet. But the glimpse – the taste – the down payment – St. Paul calls it arabon, that we get here in the bread and wine that is both the Last Supper and the feast of heaven, gives us hope that goodness and mercy shall follow us all our days and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

 

This is the power and purpose of liturgy. There is also a liturgical reading reading of the Scripture. The prophet Isaiah is doing that in this passage that we have just read (Isaiah 43:16 – 21). God has rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. He made a way out of no way and led them through the Red Sea dry shod and defeated their enemies. He led them to the mountain where He gave them a holy and righteous way of life. 11 for the desert into a promised land. All with the purpose – so they could live toward God and toward their fellow human beings in such a way that all people would recognize that they knew the true and living God and so God’s wayward children would be brought home and reconciled and say. The world then as now is perishing and needs to be saved – the evidence is no further away than the front page of the newspaper. God’s plan to save the world is the formation of the people to be His witnesses. Such were the people to which the prophet Isaiah spoke. Such are we gathered here today.

 

When the people of God had forgotten their vocation – when they departed from the holy way of life God had given them and had fallen into personal and corporate and social immorality, God sent the prophets to call them back. The prophets warned that if they did not repent disaster would befall them. They didn’t and it did. The nation was conquered and taken into captivity in Babylon, about 600 years before the birth of Christ. The prophet Isaiah, the messenger of God, is telling the people who are defeated – who are captives – who are without hope – the story of the original salvation from Egypt in such a way as to bring the power of this mighty deed of God into the present – changing the meaning of the present and giving hope for the future.

 

In the same way that God rescued Israel from bondage in Egypt – God is going to rescue the people from bondage in Babylon. They are going home. They’re going to be redeemed and restored. Just as God made a way out of no way before – he’s doing it again – just as he made a way to the desert before – he is doing it again – even the wild animals in the desert cannot fail to see what God is doing – “behold I am doing a new thing, can you not perceive it.”

 

They were returned to the holy land. But the promise of Isaiah was not completely fulfilled. There was a partial restoration but not a complete restoration. One was yet to come who would complete the work – the ultimate and final Messiah who would cleanse and re-consecrate the people.

 

When Jesus arrived on the scene the prophecy of Isaiah was being completely fulfilled – but you needed the eyes of faith to see the new thing that God was doing – how once again he was rescuing his people from bondage – this time the bondage of sin and death – cleansing and re-consecrating them as his witness people – as His missionary people.

 

The way He would do this – the way He would reestablish His Lordship over His wayward subjects is with the sacrifice of Love – this sacrificial love that has the power of the Resurrection hidden within it – it is this suffering love which gives new life and which restores us to the dignity of the witness and work God has given us to do.

 

It is through this sacrifice that Jesus is anointed to be our King and ruler in our lives and be our priest and reconcile us to God and consecrate us for lives of service.

 

St. John is showing us how Mary of Bethany’s anointing of the Lord’s feet with costly ointment is the outward sign of the Lord’s anointing as Priest and King in sacrificial Love. She fills the whole house with the odor of a costly devotion. Jesus says she is anointing Him before hand for His burial. Through his death Jesus fills the world with the fragrant odor of His costly sacrifice for the salvation of the world. In and through His death He is anointed our priest and King. Risen from the dead and ascended He reigns from on high.

 

Whenever we gather to hear the Bible read as the Living Word which makes God’s deeds present to us to transform our present and open our future – whenever we obey His command – “do this in remembrance of me” – this whole House of God is full of the fragrance of the costly seeking, searching. Suffering and saving love of God brought to us by Jesus Christ the Lord. When we leave here this fragrance of God’s grace clings to us—the fragrance of sacrificial love. By God’s grace may we preserve the scent of love among us and not let it be drowned out the bitter odors of this world with its hatred and cruelty. Amen.

A Sermon Preached on Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014
in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Catskill, NY, by the Rector, The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

Did God really raise Jesus Christ bodily from the dead? This is the most profound question a person can ask. Answer this question with the yes of faith and it tells us who God is, who Jesus is, who we are and what will become of us and of the whole cosmos, the whole created order. Answer this question with a yes and we know how we should live because we know where we are going and how we are to get there. Answer this question with a yes and we know how we can face the evil without, the sin within and suffering and death because we know definitively that none of these things has the last word.
First, we must be sure we understand what resurrection means. Resurrection is a word from Biblical Judaism and it has a very specific meaning. Resurrection means the restoration of a full human life in such a way that the person raised from the dead can do everything that a currently living person can do and especially that the raised person can enjoy the blessings of living in the blessed community of the Kingdom of God. We say in the Apostles Creed that we believe in the Resurrection of the Body. To believe in the resurrection of the body, first the body of the Lord and then our bodies is a bit redundant. Resurrection means body. God had promised Israel that He would send a Messiah, a saviour who would rescue Israel from its Gentile oppressors and establish God’s Kingdom where the will of God would be done on earth as it is in heaven. This would be the Kingdom of Shalom, of perfect peace with God and between people and even this Shalom would extend to the natural order and the Lion and Lamb would lie down together.
What about those who died before the Messiah came and the Kingdom was established. Some Jews not all, the Pharisees and not the Sadducees came to believe that the righteous dead would be bodily resurrected so that they could participate in the Kingdom. Would God really be a God of long suffering love and justice otherwise? The Messiah would defeat the enemies of Israel and the dead would be raised. The resurrection was not about the spirit surviving the death of the body but about the souls of the righteous being given a new body and a new life in a new Kingdom. The cultured pagans, the Greeks and the Romans did not believe in resurrection though they had various ideas about life after death which ranged from you die and that is it to the survival of some aspect or dimension of the person such as the soul or the spirit. In some of their literature the spirits of the dead wish they could have a body but know they cannot and in some of their literature the spirits of the dead don’t want a body because they believe the body a burden to the spirit. In all cases this world is a world that is completely and irrevocably condemned to corruption and decay.
The Jews were quite clear in order to be a full member of a perfect community of peace and love you need a body. You need a way to love and to be loved. The body is the way we relate to one another and it is the means by which we express love. The body is the means through which we express adoration and worship of God (this is why churches need to be places of worship and liturgy and not just talking shops) and the body is the means through which we offer each other loving service. A human being without a body is not a full human being. You would be just a shadow of your former self which is what a lot of the ancients called dead people, shades. When the saviour came to establish the Kingdom which would have no end, the righteous would get bodies. Some of them thought of this in a fairly crude way which would have to be corrected in light of the Lord’s risen body but they were very clear that the pagan alternatives were not adequate to the promises that God had made to His people in the scriptures.
To say that Jesus has been raised from the dead is to say that the God who made the world has acted decisively to remake it in the death and resurrection of the Lord and that the new age, the age of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Shalom, the age of the resurrection is appearing, and that death will have no more dominion and that God’s faithful people will be getting new bodies so that they can participate fully in the new creation. St. John in his exile has a vision: one like the Lamb of God sitting on the throne of heaven says, “behold I make all things new.” (Rev. 21:5) God had said something similar through the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament in a prophecy about the coming salvation of God, “Behold I do a new thing, do you not perceive it.” (Isaiah 43:19)
One of the early Church Fathers, Peter Chrysologus says, “Pray, brothers, that the angel would descend now and roll away all the hardness of our hearts and open up our closed senses and declare to our minds that Christ has risen, for just as the heart in which Christ lives and reigns is heaven, so also the heart in which Christ remains dead and buried is a grave.”( Sermons 75.4)
That Jesus Christ has been raised bodily from the dead is exactly what the scriptures do say. The tomb is empty, the rock is rolled away not to let him out but so that we can know that God has raised Jesus and in doing so has revealed him to be Son of God and Saviour of the world, the one through whom God has vanquished all the enemies of our human nature, sin, evil and the last enemy of all is death.
The resurrection of the body challenges our imagination. It challenged the imagination of those in the ancient world as well. The Resurrection is hard to imagine because it is a uniquely, unique event. The only equivalent is the original creation of the world out of nothing by God in the beginning. The scientist can investigate that event and its consequences but cannot get behind it. Similarly, the historian can investigate the event of the Resurrection. What do the stories of the empty tomb and the appearances add up to? How dependable are these witnesses? Why if you were making this up in the ancient world and wanted it to have any kind of chance would you make the original witnesses women unless it happened that way? What is the sort of experience that could turn cowering deserters into these men of whom the Book of Acts says, “these men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” But you can’t get behind the event of whom in the nature of the case only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the witness. None of the Gospel writers tell of it. They tell of the empty tomb and the risen Lord with the marks of the crucifixion still upon him, whom they handled and who ate and drank with them and who appeared and disappeared at will. They tell also of His promise that after a while He would appear to them no longer in this way but be with them always through the power of the Spirit until the end of the age. And we proclaim it still that the Lord lives and makes Himself known to us when we gather two or three in His name and in the breaking of the bread. It is the same Lord whom the Father raised from the tomb and who appeared to His disciples.
It is hard to imagine this resurrection body that is as real as the bodies we have now, which takes up space but which also transcends the limits of this mortal body. It is relatively easy to imagine old and familiar things and relatively hard to imagine new things. The resurrection first of Jesus, then of us and then the resurrection and restoration of the whole cosmos is the uniquely new thing that God is doing in Jesus Christ the Lord. Just because it is hard to imagine doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It was notoriously hard to imagine how light could be particle and wave at the same time but it turns out to be true. St. Paul compares the pre-resurrection body to the resurrection body as a seed compares to the fully formed plant. Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption, sown mortal, raised immortal. (1 Cor. 15:42)

The bodily Resurrection of Jesus is the absolute center of the Christian faith. We are not saved by a ghostly saviour for a ghostly future but by a real saviour for a real future. We will not be less than we are now but more and can lean into that more even now in the power of the Spirit.
St. Paul says that if Christ be not raised then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain and that if Christ is not raised we are still dead in our sins. But if it is true that God has raised Jesus bodily from the dead then God is who He says He is, a God of love and justice and who hates nothing He has made and will not suffer it to see destruction and Jesus is who He says He is, the Son of God who was tempted in every way as we are and did not sin and who having defeated by a sacrifice of love on the cross all the enemies of our human nature offers us a share in His risen life that as He is so we might be also. We know where we are going, we are on our way to be new people in a new community in a new creation. Even now the power of that new creation which is the power of Risen Lord and of His Spirit is at work in us and among us making us fit for the life of the world which is coming. We know how to live. We are to live in this old age as witnesses of the age that is coming. We know what will become of us and of the good creation which St. Irenaeus called the whole handwork of God. We know that if we cling to Him who is the Resurrection and Life that the sin within and the evil without will be finally defeated and have no more room in the new world where there is no more sighing nor death but only life everlasting where the Risen Lord, the lamb who sits upon the throne shall reign forever and ever and of His Kingdom there shall be no end. Amen.

“Faith Is The Assurance Of Things Hoped For: The Conviction Of Things Not Seen.”

Trinity Chapel, Kennebunk Beach Maine, August 11, 2013

The Rev. Dr. Leander S Harding

 

One of the great biblical questions is – “When the Lord returns will he find faith on the earth?” The letter to the Hebrews is addressed to a congregation composed mostly of Jewish Christians. The old faith, Judaism is on the list of religions officially tolerated by the Empire. The new religion Christianity has made them the target of a vicious imperial persecution and some are going back to the old faith. This letter, which among other things explains the issue of faith, urges the persecuted Christians to keep the Faith.

 

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen.” In our contemporary parlance faith is belief in something for which there is not overwhelming empirical evidence. Faith for many contemporary people is an inferior form of knowledge. There are things that you can know for a fact and then there are beliefs. With regard to facts, say the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water, we must all agree. This is the realm of public truth. Beliefs belong to the private world. Perhaps there is a God, perhaps not. Believe what you will as long as you don’t insist on your belief as public truth.

 

This is the worldview of modernity. It is characterized by an overconfidence in scientific knowledge and a complete loss of confidence in the spiritual and moral traditions which gave rise to the scientific method in the first place. Postmodernism is characterized by an even more thoroughgoing pessimism about what can be known with confidence. Even the correlation between scientific knowledge and an objective reality out there beyond human invention is questioned. This creates a spiritual and moral ethos and mood that oscillates between aimless emptiness and nihilistic despair and waves of enthusiasm for the latest and most exotic spiritualities which look suspiciously like crude and ancient superstitions in thin disguise.

 

We are not in this country being persecuted yet for our faith but there is a kind of persecution that exists as the culture minimizes and marginalizes the historic Christian Faith, making foundational truths about who God is and what he is like and what he has done for us and for our sake into things on the same level with belief in astrology or the virtues of rabbits feet.

 

Since the beginning of the 20th century the Christian church, particularly in its Protestant form, has tried to accommodate itself to this worldview which makes of faith an inferior form of knowledge, by soft-pedaling its essential truth claims, that Jesus Christ is the unique and the eternal son of God and represents the creator’s decisive intervention into human affairs, that his sacrifice of love on the cross is a saving death, that he rose from the grave and has opened the way to eternal life, that by the gift of the Holy Spirit this life can begin to grow in us even now.

 

We must simply resist the idea that faith is an inferior form of knowledge, and taking our cue from the great scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, point out that faith is involved in all knowing whatsoever. The scientific method depends on the faith that the universe is a rational universe and that the human mind can grasp that rational order. These are beliefs that come from the Bible and are not shared by the religions of the East. All knowing involves trust and faith to some degree. Rather than faith being an inferior form of knowing – rather than it being believing versus knowing – faith is an element in all knowledge. To know anything we must trust someone or something outside of ourselves. St. Augustine said it very well many centuries ago, “I believe in order to understand.”

 

Traditionally Christian theology has divided faith into two interdependent parts. There is the credo part of faith – the creedal – doctrinal aspect. I believe in God, the Father Almighty and in His Son Jesus Christ. Faith has content and truth claims and with regard to the divinity of Christ, His saving death, His resurrection from the dead, these are not claims of private belief, true for me but not for you, but claims of public truth. The resurrection is the most plausible explanation for the change that came over the apostles and for their motivation to change the world with their teaching and preaching. All other explanations are implausible as history. The truths of the Christian faith are up to scrutiny and challenge. They do not need to be protected by a voluntary self exile to the world of private opinion.

 

Faith also has the aspect of trust. Jesus says that the devils believe in Him but do not trust and obey. To live the life of faith is to trust in the reality of God, and the love of God, in the care and providence of God.

 

Trust and belief are dynamic. As we trust in God, lean on God, we find him trustworthy and find reason to have a growing confidence and growing faith.

 

Faith also has this aspect – it is both something we do and it is a gift from God. God through the Holy Spirit draws us to himself.

 

If you have been reading the daily readings in the Book of Common Prayer this week, you have heard the story of the man who comes to Jesus beseeching healing for his son. No one else has been able to help them. Is it possible? Jesus says, “with faith all things are possible.” The man cries out, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.” That is a good prayer. We can all say that prayer; we can all pray that we will grow in trust and confidence in the promises of God and in the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen. Things such as the love, care and providence of God which are unseen except to the eyes of faith. When two scientists disagree about a scientific theory they don’t say, “you have your truth and I have mine.” They put truth to the test. Christian truth claims are robust enough to stand that kind of challenge. Scientists prove their theories through experiment. Christian truth is confirmed as well through the experiment of trust, prayer, study and service. Trusting in God, obeying by God’s grace, following in the footsteps of Jesus – the reality of the invisible Christ becomes visible.

Faith was the great motto of the Protestant Reformation. We are saved – we are made whole – we are healed – and made right with God not by our own devices but by faith – belief and trust in the unmerited love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ our Lord and by letting him so take over our lives that he becomes visible in us. May this be so. Amen

“And the Fragrance Filled the Whole House”

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen the Martyr in Stuebenville, Ohio, Fifty Lent, March 17, 2013

By the Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

 

When we gather for the liturgy of the church, when we celebrate the Eucharist, we are remembering what God has done in the past. We are remembering the in a particular sort of way. By the power of the Holy Spirit as we are obedient to the command that He gave us on the night in which He was betrayed, “do this in remembrance of me” what God has done in the past, the Father’s costly deed of saving love in sending the To Save Us by the Power the Holy Spirit has been made into a present and living reality – transforming our present existence and opening up a new future – whose horizon is heaven and the coming Kingdom of God. Just as the past is made present, the future is made present and we are given a foretaste of the world to come.

 

The future that God has in store for us will, until we die or the Lord returns, be already a not yet. But the glimpse – the taste – the down payment – St. Paul calls it arabon that we get here in the bread and wine that is both the Last Supper and the feast of heaven, gives us hope that goodness and mercy shall follow us all our days and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

 

This is the power and purpose of liturgy. There is also a liturgical reading – we might even say and Eucharistic reading of the Scripture. The prophet Isaiah is doing that in this passage that we have just read (Isaiah 43:16 – 21). God has rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. He made a way out of no way and led them through the Red Sea dry shot and defeated their enemies. He led them to the mountain where He gave them a holy and righteous way of life. 11 for the desert into a promised land. All with the purpose – so they could live toward God and toward their fellow human beings in such a way that all people would recognize that they knew the true and living God and so God’s wayward children would be brought home and reconciled and say. The world then as now is perishing and needs to be saved – the evidence is no further waive the front page of the newspaper. God’s plan to save the world is the formation of the people to be His witnesses. Such were the people to which the prophet Isaiah spoke. Such are we gathered here today.

 

When the people of God had forgotten their vocation – when they departed from the holy way of life God had given them and fell into personal and corporate and social immorality, God sent the prophets to call them back. The prophets warned that if they did not repent disaster would befall them. They didn’t and it did. The nation was conquered and taken into captivity in Babylon, about 600 years before the birth of Christ. The prophet Isaiah, the messenger of God, is telling – a retelling the people who are defeated – who are captives – who are without hope – the story of the original salvation from Egypt in such a way as to bring the power of this mighty deed of God into the present – changing the meaning of the present and giving hope for the future.

 

In the same way that God rescued Israel from bondage in Egypt – God is going to rescue the people from bondage in Babylon. They are going home. They’re going to be redeemed and restored. Just as God made a way out of no way before – he’s doing it again – just as he made a way to the desert before – he is doing it again – even the wild animals in the desert cannot fail to see what God is doing – “behold I am doing a new thing, can you not perceive it.”

 

They were returned to the holy land. But the promise of Isaiah was not completely fulfilled – there was a partial restoration but not a complete restoration. One was yet to come who would complete the work – the ultimate and final Messiah who would cleanse and re-consecrate the people.

 

When Jesus arrived on the scene the prophecy of Isaiah was being completely fulfilled – but you needed the eyes of faith to see the new thing that God was doing – how once again he was rescuing his people from bondage – this time the bondage of sin and death – cleansing and re-consecrating them as his witness people – as His missionary people.

 

The way He would do this – the way He would reestablish His Lordship over His wayward subjects is with the sacrifice of Love – is this sacrificial love that has the power of the Resurrection hidden within it – it is this suffering love which gives new life in which restores us to the dignity of the witness work God has given us to do.

 

It is through this sacrifice that Jesus is anointed to be our King and ruler in our lives and be our priest and reconcile us to God and consecrate us for lives of service.

 

St. John is showing us how Mary of Bethany’s anointing of the Lord’s feet with costly ointment is the outward sign of the Lord’s anointing as Priest and King in sacrificial Love.

 

Whenever we gather to hear the Bible read as the Living Word which makes God’s deeds present to us to transform our present and open our future – whenever we obey His command – “do this in remembrance of me” – this whole House of God is full of the fragrance of the costly seeking, searching. Suffering and saving love of God brought to us by Jesus Christ the Lord. When we leave here this fragrance by God’s grace clings to us—the fragrance of sacrificial love. By God’s grace may we preserve the scent of love among us and not let it be drowned out the bitter odors of this world with its hatred and cruelty.

 

This Love is the Hope of the world and it is our hope – that things could ever be different here – or hereafter.

 

I want to say a final word about Psalm 126 “those who sow the seed with tears will come again rejoicing carrying the sheaves.”

 

The African students at the seminary relate this to a famine, when they must make the choice between eating the seed corn were depriving the family of the last of the food – so that there may be some hope of harvest. With tears in their eyes for their hungry children, they sow the seed, in hope of the harvest.

 

I think this is where we are in the church today – under judgment and in exile – getting to the bottom of our resources – faced with hard choices about gambling it all on the future – God is faithful – we should hold nothing back but bet all on Him – He is doing a new thing – give us grace to perceive it and give us grace to hope. Amen.

On the Newtown Killings
A young man with his school years not that far behind him took his mother’s assault rifle—killed her and then broke into the local elementary school and slaughtered 26 human beings, including himself—twenty of them little children and the rest their teachers and helpers.
We watch the news with a mixture of overwhelming sadness, revulsion and hope that the next story will make sense of something that has a hard core of darkness that can never be wholly explained.
There are legitimate questions that will be raised—should it be so easy to obtain military style weapons—are we doing all we can for those who suffer from diseases of the brain—can the security of our schools and public places be improved? Perhaps if we are really courageous we will ask if our children are really as happy as we pretend they are. All this is as it should be. Though, those who engage in these debates will have a challenge to grant the victims and their families their due dignity and not reduce them to illustrations in some polemical exchange.
This is a very horrible event. It is a lot for one community to suffer. That the local funeral services are overwhelmed is a poignant marker of the magnitude of the suffering. And this suffering full as it is, is but a thimbleful of the suffering of the world—the number 20 only a small portion of the number of children murdered every day—sometimes by deranged individuals and sometimes by deranged states. Each one of these deaths is both a cosmic, world-shattering event, in and of itself and at the same time a cipher in an unimaginably large number.
How are we to face this darkness? Certainly, human effort is required. New thinking and new effort is needed by individuals, communities and authorities. But the recognition that such efforts are needed is the very thing that threatens to push us over the precipice of despair—for we have been trying—men and women have been trying for a very long time to roll back the darkness and still it threatens to overwhelm us. The story of the slaughter of the innocents is a very old story. (The feast of the Holy Innocents is December 28, one of the 12 days of Christmas during which we remember both that the light has come and the darkness is real.)
To look the darkness full in the face as at a time like this we are forced to do—brings us very quickly to the place where the human heart cries out for help. Even in a world that has forgotten the name of God—an inarticulate prayer goes up whose only possible translation is, “Oh, God help us.” The human heart at its most honest and realistic knows that there is no hope save that God is our helper.
We live in a time when many have been taught to suppress that cry and that very natural prayer of the human heart. We live in a time when many of our friends are taught that to be brave means to accept being alone in the dark.
It falls to us who know the name of God and know that He has come among us at great cost to take our darkness and death upon Himself and give us in exchange His light and life, and who know that as St. John saith, “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness overcomes it not,” to say to those who struggle to keep the secret prayer of their heart from escaping to let their cry go free to Him who is our helper, defender and friend. It falls to us to say that we cannot roll back the darkness on our own but that with God all things are possible.
The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D. III Advent, 2012.

“It Is I, Be Not Afraid”

Pentecost 9, July 29, 2012

Trinity Chapel, Kennebunk Beach, Maine

Fr. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D., Vicar

 

John 6: 1-21

 

The primary story about salvation in the Bible is the story of Exodus. The Hebrew people – the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — have gone down to Egypt because of a great famine. God providentially prepared the way for them by sending ahead of them Joseph. His brothers meant to kill him but instead they sold him into slavery and Joseph became the governor over all Egypt – saving both the Egyptians and his own people from starving. God turned an evil deed inside out and brought good from it.

 

And there arose on the throne of Egypt a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph and he oppressed the people of Israel – causing them to make bricks without straw and ordering that all the boy babies be put to death. God providentially protected one of those babies and caused him to be saved and brought up in Pharaoh’s house as a prince of Egypt. (If you have children in the house, I heartily recommend the video of Disney’s Prince of Egypt.) This child grows up to be Moses – the prophet of God – the first Messiah and Savior of his people.

 

God says to Moses, “go down Moses, way down to Egypt land, tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.” With a mighty and an outstretched hand God working through Moses delivers the people from their hard bondage and when the army of Pharaoh is on one side and the Red Sea is on the other – God makes a way out of no way and the people pass over from death to life and from slavery to freedom. Then God leads them to Mount Sinai and he gives them a holy and righteous way of life – the 10 Commandments. He leads them towards the promised land. God is present to lead and to guide – to correct and protect.

 

God speaks to them through Moses and he leads them with a column of fire by night and the cloud by day. He instructs them to build a tent of meeting and the glory of God fills the tent and the dwelling place of God is in the midst of his people.

 

Despite all these signs and wonders the people doubt God. They accuse Moses of bringing them out into the desert to die of thirst and hunger. God tells Moses to strike the rock and water pours out, and God sends the manna upon the face of the wilderness. It is something that looks insubstantial like frost but it is their daily bread and sustains them on their way. And don’t try to take more than a day’s worth or it will rot in your hands. So God leads them and guides them and feeds them supernaturally and brings them at last to the promised land. As they approached the promised land, God parts the Jordan for them just like he parted the Red Sea.

 

And when my task on earth is done

when by thy grace the victory’s won,

e’en death’s cold wave I will not flee

for God through Jordan leadeth me

 

Everything that God did through Moses for Israel is done again for us but more profoundly in Jesus Christ. He has come to set us free from slavery to the service of false gods – the idols of this world that promised so much and deliver so little and whose service is a more cruel slavery than that to Pharaoh of old. He has come to rescue us from hatred and sin and evil. He has come to make a way out of no way by a sacrifice of love, and to lead us from slavery to freedom and from death to life. He has come to reassert the holy and righteous way of life given on that mountain, all those years ago, but also to give us grace and a new spirit to live that life.

 

And as he has promised, he has not left us orphans. The promised Spirit has come: the one who is Himself the love that the Father and the Son share with each other. The Spirit leads and guides us, and in and through the power of the Spirit the Lord himself is present in His Word – His sacraments – in our midst when two or three are gathered in his name and when we minister to Him in His distressing disguise amongst the poor and those that suffer.

 

When Jesus feeds the multitudes in the wilderness it is a sign that one more powerful than Moses is here. When He appears to them in the midst of the storm when the rowing is hard, it is a sign that the Savior can be trusted to make a way out of no way and to bring us safely through the waves that threaten to undo us.

 

So the Scripture confronts us with the opportunity and a challenge to say with the crowds, “surely this is the one God has promised to send.”

 

There is something about the human heart. It needs constant reassurance. Though the deliverance at the Red Sea were yesterday, we ask today; “Is God real? Can he feed us in this wilderness? Can he be any practical help in the midst of this storm?”

 

It is natural to look for a sign. There is a wonderful image going around the Internet. It is the picture of the signboard outside of a Baptist church somewhere in the South. It is the kind of signboard with movable letters where the message changes week to week. The sign says, “If you are looking for a sign from God, this is it.”

 

The whole Gospel of John is in fact a series of signs which people mostly don’t perceive. The greatest of all the signs is of course the cross which in the world’s eyes looks like folly and defeat.

 

Here there is a paradox – God provides us with signs of His love and providential care but in such a way that we are not overwhelmed but left free to respond freely in love. Like Moses of old, Christ continues to be present to lead and guide, to correct and protect – to help us live holy and righteous lives that are worthy of the human dignity for which we have been created and to bring us at last to the promised land.

 

If we want the answer to the questions “Is God real? Can God do anything today?”, if we want the reassurance for which the human heart longs, if we want to answer our natural craving for a sign, then we should look in those places where the Lord has promised to meet us and where he hangs out the sign–by Bible reading, by continuing to gather week by week so that he might be made known to us in the breaking of the bread, by seeking him in prayer and in the fellowship of his followers, and in acts of service and charity.

 

This is not always easy. This persistent and consistent life of faith is sometimes hard rowing against the night wind. But we may in good faith expect to hear him say, “Be not afraid; it is I .” Amen.

“You Did Not Choose Me, I Chose You”

Seventh Pentecost, July 15, 2012

Trinity Chapel, Kennebunk Beach, Maine

Fr. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

 

Last week we looked at the nature of biblical prophecy and what Jesus meant by calling himself a prophet. We saw the prophet is as much a forth-teller as a fore-teller. The prophet confronts us with our sin and warns of disaster, if we do not repent. We looked at some of the very blunt, very judgmental, very condemnatory language of the prophets. Language such as John the Baptist used in his condemnation of King Herod and his incestuous marriage. We saw the fate of the prophets – that they are rejected, persecuted and killed as happens with John the Baptist in the Gospel before us. St. Mark is telling us that everything that happened to the prophets will happen to Jesus the prophet. And we see that the cross is the prophecy in that it is the definitive word of judgment and condemnation on the world’s sin and the human hatred and rejection of God. It is also the ultimate prophecy of mercy and forgiveness. The cross is the answer to the command of God given to the prophet Isaiah, “speak ye tenderly to Jerusalem and tell them her that her warfare is accomplished and her iniquity is pardoned.” The cross is a word which judges and condemns human evil and it is also God’s tender word of forgiveness – the Father pleading in and through the Son that his children should return home – followed up by the power of the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit which so to speak gives the ticket and the traveling money to those who are willing to humble themselves and lay hold of the offer.

 

There is a great mystery which in theology is called the doctrine of election. That is why some people answer the call of Jesus Christ who says, “come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” And why some do not. Some people just grow up with a God orientation. They grow up friends of Jesus. They cannot remember when they were not attentive to this word of love. Some have come to faith late. In my own case I was very receptive, very attentive when a child and then for a while grew deaf and in my college years, my ears and eyes were opened once again. Some people have always been in love with God and others knew him not and fell suddenly in love with him. Still others have had the benefit of the church, the Bible and sacraments, their whole life and though they have been sealed with the promises of God in baptism – yet they seem oddly tone deaf to the things of God and to the call of God.

 

Why do some respond and some not? This mystery is called the doctrine of election. Election here means being chosen, being singled out, those being called. The word church is from the Greek word ecclesia, which means the assembly that is called out and called together. The church is sometimes called the elect, those who have answered the call. You would not be here today if you were not responding to God’s word of love and his call upon your life.

 

Why us and not them? This mystery cuts through families. A husband heeds the call but not the wife or vice versa or a parent but not the child though they have been nurtured in the faith. At the school where I teach we have a number of students preparing for Christian ministry who are grieved that they are not able to share the joy of their calling with parents who are indifferent to the call of God.

 

The full answer to this mystery is hidden in the secret counsels of God. We can say two things about our calling and our election in Jesus Christ. We can know with confidence the basis of our calling and we can know the purpose – the why and what for.

 

Why have we been chosen and why have we answered – however imperfectly (our answer to God’s call upon our lives is always a work in progress. This is a matter of what in theology is called our sanctification). Our call and even our response to the call are in no way our doing. It is the grace of God through and through. We like Israel of old have been called to be God’s chosen people not because of any merit or good deed or accomplishment of our own but because it is God’s nature to love without recompense. Perhaps a good man will die for his friends but while we were yet God’s enemies he sought us out to befriend us. The son of God goes forth to die for his enemies.

 

Our calling, our selection, our election is because of grace. The incongruity of those called reveals the character of God and God’s gratuitous and unmerited love and forgiveness. Why do some respond and not others? Because God has granted us the grace to do so. This is hard to understand. Faith is both a gift of God and something which we do. We reach out in faith and make our own what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, and yet faith is a gift – God’s grace at work in us. So we could say in one word why we who are here this morning are among the elect. Grace, which is another way of saying, the unearned and superabundant love of God.

 

But for what purpose? What is the meaning of our election? Election has its meaning in the mission of God. God is on a mission. His mission is, as Ephesians 6:10 says, to gather up all things in Christ. His mission is to gather his warring children into one loving family and to gather together heaven and earth so that the prayer that our Lord taught us, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” will finally come true.

 

To advance his mission God has called an elect people – an elect family, not because they are better than the other tribes and nations but so they might under the word of crucified love, by the power of the resurrection and through the gift of the Holy Spirit, live toward God and toward their fellow human beings in such a way that God’s plan to turn all his children home might go forward. We have been called by God’s inscrutable will and his gratuitous love that we might be a light to the nations – that we might “live for the praise of his glory” and touch the world with his love. There is a great old song that expresses this well, “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning”.

 

Brightly beams our Fathers mercy

from his lighthouse evermore,

but to us he gives the keeping

of the lights along the shore.

let the lower lights be burning

send the gleam upon the wave

some poor fainting, struggling sailor

you may rescue, you may save

 

Let the lower lights be burning

send the gleam upon the wave – Amen.